The third is of the Lagoon Nebula, a star forming region a quadrillion miles across and 4000 light years in toward the center of the galaxy. And the image? Well, if you want the full-res version, you’d better have some room on your drive: it has 370 million pixels and will eat up a whopping 700 Mb of disk space.

The depth and detail are simply and truly jaw-dropping. You can zoom in and see young stars, massive stars, dark clouds, ribbons and sheets of gas sculpted by vast winds of subatomic particles blown off of supergiant stars.

The Lagoon was always a favorite target of mine in the summer months when the center of the Milky Way in Scorpius and Sagittarius would just clear my neighbor’s trees. A nearby streetlight always made observing in that direction a pain, but even from a distance of 40 quadrillion kilometers away the nebulous glow of gas and newly-born stars still shone through. I wouldn’t have been able to imagine back then that I’d be able to zoom in on the Lagoon using a 2.2 meter telescope equipped with a 67 megapixel camera!

There is science in this picture, to be sure. We can study it to look at the shape of the nebula, how it interacts with the stars and other nearby nebulae, and much more. But you know what? At this exact moment, I don’t care.

Because my oh my, the Universe is a beautiful place. And sometimes, for just a little while, that’s enough.

Just as well that the link is broken, I think it’s not a good idea to link directly to a 700MB image. Think of the poor servers, think of the poor administrator who gets the bandwidth bill! Too bad I couldn’t find a .jpg version of the image, the size of that would probably be 70MB at most even at highest quality settings…

This is amazing. I think we are looking at the solar systems past our solar system formed form a nebula like this billons of years ago and we may find planets forming there as well as stars . p.s. My favort things to look at are the orion nebula and the pleiades .advice to Phill get a fliter thats blocks streetlights astronomy catalogs sell them I have one it makes observations in the city easey

How: I started with the 64.5 MB TIFF linked by John Phillips, and shrunk it in Photoshop CS4 to 1900 pixels wide with “bicubic sharper” resampling. The vertical dimension was 1286 pixels so I chopped the 86 from the top. Then I saved it as a JPEG at quality 8, which is probably good enough for desktop use (I wanted it under 1 MB).

I’m not using it for my wallpaper yet though because I’m still enjoying that Cassini composite of Saturn too much

@I’d rather be fishin’
Ok. Here goes… I thought this was supposed to be an astronomy blog. Pretty pictures are not astronomy. Just because the said artwork contains astronomical objects does not make it astronomy. More equations, diagrams and the occasional earth-shattering boom are required to make this astronomy.

Awesome image.
Slightly OT, last night was an almost perfect night for the ol’ Galileoscope. Our moon and Jupiter were in very close proximity. Could almost see 5 moons in the same view and Jupiter is looking gorgeous at the moment.

“You can zoom in and see young stars, massive stars, dark clouds, ribbons and sheets of gas sculpted by vast winds of subatomic particles blown off of supergiant stars. ”

So there!

“There is science in this picture, to be sure. We can study it to look at the shape of the nebula, how it interacts with the stars and other nearby nebulae, and much more. But you know what? At this exact moment, I don’t care.”

I realise I’m a day or so late, but I downloaded the image and used a tilecutter to turn it into a Deep Zoom image. You can explore it interactively at full resolution here: http://www.notdot.net/lagoon/